Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @03:17AM
from the getting-it dept.

Medieval Cow writes "Sir Paul McCartney has a side project called The Fireman and he's just released their new album, Electric Arguments, as a digital download. Why this is of interest to this community is that he released it 100% DRM-free. You can purchase just the digital files, or if you purchase a physical CD or vinyl copy, you are also given access to the digital download. Not only that, but the download is available in 320-kbps MP3, Apple Lossless, or even FLAC format. If you're interested in trying before you buy, you can listen to the entire album in a Flash player on the main page of the site. It's so nice to see a big musician who gets it. Bravo, Sir Paul!"

Paul McCartney was one of the biggest proponents of that attempt to get retroactive copyright extension of sound recordings a few years back. Maybe he's changed his attitude towards copyright since then.. or maybe he's just interested in making a buck (or a bob) any way he can.

Paul McCartney was one of the biggest proponents of that attempt to get retroactive copyright extension of sound recordings a few years back. Maybe he's changed his attitude towards copyright since then.. or maybe he's just interested in making a buck (or a bob) any way he can.

This is a particularly good time in the history of the recording industry to be one of the "good guys" who drops the DRM and gets press for doing it.

Notice the huge free ad he just got on Slashdot?

And think about it -- if you're choosing between paying for a Metallica vs. paying for this one, what goes through your head?* I hate that @#$%in' DRM...* Metallica! Those DRM-loving pricks. @#$% 'em, I'm just getting this one off the internets.* McCartney! He removed the DRM... Maybe I shouldn't rip him off.

It's a marketing experiment. There'll probably be more freeloaders, since the people who *wanted* to get their music for free but couldn't figure it out will have an easier time of it. But if sales are boosted enough by the good press and goodwill, the experiment will have succeeded.

>>>There'll probably be more freeloaders..... but if sales are boosted enough by the good press and goodwill, the experiment will have succeeded.

Yes that's the flaw with this "try before you buy" model:

(1) Under the old paradigm I had to buy the CD to discover I didn't like it. So record company gets + $12.(2) Under the new paradigm the record company has a loss of 0.1 cent (approximate cost of bandwidth I used). 0.1 cent may not sound like much but when multiplied by a few million non-purchasing

After all, most slashdotters are not anti-copyright. The industry position on DRM is based on confusing DRM with copyright and (ironically) compensating musicians.

Acknowledging a sizable die hard "information wants to be free" contingent, I think the consensus position here is that artists should be able to make money with copyrighted but DRM free music, priced reasonably, and packaged for convenient purchase and use. True, that means the only the most efficient distributors make money, which is bad for so

That's the whole point of the issue. Digital copying has the recording industry running around like a chicken with their heads cut off.

A digital copy never degrades. Assuming no corruption (which good protocols prevent), the 5 billionth copy sounds just the same as the first. So in essence, a copy is just as good as "the real thing". They panic and insist that DRM is a "must" because otherwise, people will copy those songs wholesale.

The thing that they forget though is the same thing that drove them into the frenzy in the first place: DIGITAL COPIES DON'T degrade. If I want to pirate a song, I generally don't go to my buddy who bought a non-DRM'd copy. I'd go to a sharing site. Since a digital copy doesn't degrade, then as you said it only takes ONE copy of the song without DRM to spawn as many non-DRM'd copies as are necessary to quench the thirst of the masses.

In the end it's STUPID. Anybody who wants a free (regardless of legality) non-DRM'd copy of any song or movie knows exactly where to get it. The only people who get affected by the hassles of DRM are the people who wish to obey the law. So, ironically, they get a worse product than the pirates. Rather than the copy being "just as good" as the real thing, it's now actually BETTER.

Try to sell an inferior product at a higher price with nothing more than a law that most people see as antiquated, and it's not going to fly. Particularly when the vast majority of offenders of this law are never prosecuted, and you have a recipe for the collapse of an industry. The solution is simple. Provide a SUPERIOR product, and a REASONABLE price, and people will buy it.

We all should. Rubbish or not (I'm with you on that, FWIW), Macca does "shift" a lot of "product", and if he makes this model work then the labels are going to take notice. Sure, Macca's target demographic isn't the one doing most of the downloading, (I'm too old to be happy without physical media but too young to be in Macca's target fanbase) but it's still a significant move (one of many, of course) pushing the industry towards a 21st century business model.

I think with the wide proliferation of portable music players since 2001, there's a big market for portable music files anyway. I think every musician is starting to realize that if they want to capture this market they have to find a way to make it easier to copy music to these portable music players.

Mind you, I'd like to see everyone on the commercial side gravitate towards using AAC-encoded files, since they tend to sound better than MP3-encoded files and the fact that most generation Apple iPods support

I'm impressed that he lets you try the album before you buy it, and that it's in flash. Of course, nobody would ever download the file and convert it to an mpeg because that wouldn't be honest.

Meh, some obviously will. But what's the quality on that MP3? And of course the obvious realization: you can bet a lot of people in the music industry watch these experiments very carefully.

If more people just find a way to get the album without paying for it (because that's obviously easier without the DRM... though still not completely trivial for the average fan)...then they will be forced back into DRM-based approaches.

It's a money experiment. Dunno how they'll measure exactly... I suppose they can

When they released Death Magnetic, they put a flash player on their website so you can listen to the whole album to see if it's worth buying. You can still listen to it now : http://www.metallica.com/index.asp?item=601231 [metallica.com]

I was very surprised at the time that nobody seemed to give a flying fuck, I thought it was a very interesting move, especially coming from Metallica... It was not even mentioned in online reviews ffs! I hardly saw any mention of that anywhere, and had to add it myself to the Wikipedia page (it was deleted instead of being expanded, natch).
Really, I've no idea why, but nobody cared. At all. (Not even fans, before you say noone cares about Metallica period)

One point to make though is that Paul McCartney is the sort of guy who can afford to go DRM free, if this album is ripped, lobbed on bit-torrent and limewire then Macca is unlikely to be out on the streets through lost revenue. Its great that he has done it but the _fear_ of being ripped off is going to be less for one of the biggest selling artists of all time than it would be for the average band.

Kudos indeed, but this isn't just a random artist choosing DRM this is the bloke from the Beatles who co-wrote the first hit for the Rolling Stones and the Frog Chorus.

Yes, but McCartney is also an unusual artist by virtue of the fact that he owns the rights to a vast number of songs (something like 3,000) which he didn't write himself. Among others, Buddy Holly's back-catalog.
So, seeing it from the viewpoint of a rather large rights-holder releasing songs DRM-free, the shoe is on the other foot.

...if this album is ripped, lobbed on bit-torrent and limewire then Macca is unlikely to be out on the streets through lost revenue.

It's another test, in the eyes of the music industry & other artists. Naturally they're all watching to see how this goes.

And obviously everyone knows he's filthy rich, and doesn't need their money... so you won't have people buying the album (vs. snagging elsewhere for free) simply because they feel he needs the money. That could be a factor for less well-known artists.

So, yeah, let's see how the test goes. For all the people who argue that *this* is the more profitable way to release an album -- t

I honestly can't see how DRM has any material effect on album profit either way, because:

1) DRM is absolutely no barrier to it hitting P2P within seconds of its release.
2) For every raving Freeeeeeeeeeeedom loving nerd who withholds their money in outraged pique, there's ten thousand purchasing goobers who couldn't even spell DRM if you gifted them the D and R and hummed "Mmmmm" at them.

There may be an effect on overall earnings, in that giving it away might build goodwill for concert and moichandising

You make a good point, and it's all about risk. Anyone who is wealthy can easily release music without DRM, but so do many very small unknown bands. The ones who would be surprising to see release DRM are the ones in the middle - on the verge of success or moderately popular. They may not get a lot of revenue but are somewhat comfortable. If a middle of the road band (monetarily) starts releasing DRM-free music, that would be news.

Janis Ian [wikipedia.org] claimed quite the opposite in an article [baen.com] from all the way back in 2002: It's the "biggest selling artists", if anyone, who are to be concerned about sharing - the "average" band/artist hardly receives money from their label but gets a lot more exposure (and thus income) from shared music.

Then again, that is more-or-less also the argument behind the existence of the Baen Free Library [baen.com] in the first place, where this article is hosted. Go check it out if you like SF.

The song in question is I Wanna Be Your Man, written by Lennon and McCartney. The Rolling Stones released it as a single in 1963, before the Beatles did. It was their second single, reaching number 12 on the UK charts. The Stones' first single reached number 21, so I Wanna Be Your Man could be considered their first "hit" if you think of "hit" as meaning "top 20". The song was also the B side of the first single the Stones released in the USA.

You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job.

Stallman is that you? Are you serious?

Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.

WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free? Da Vinci shouldn't have taken that commission for the Mona Lisa? Mozart should never have taken that court job or done those popular operas?

The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that.Go and have a look at some of the musicians, opera singers, composers and the like (who didn't drink it all away) from previous centuries and realise what a piece of muppetry you are saying.

I don't have the right to listen freely to their music, it just happens to work well.

I've never felt like condemning copyright violation as outright theft before but your mentality really does seem to be in that category of "F-U, F-everyone" and "I'm alright Jack" asshole that just deserves to be up before the judge. I don't have a right to my neighbours car... and you know what I won't be taking it for a joy ride no matter how well it would work for me.

Oh hang on, you are clearly actually an RIAA plant because no-one could be that big a sociopath.... could they?

You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job.

Stallman is that you? Are you serious?

Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.

WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free? Da Vinci shouldn't have taken that commission for the Mona Lisa? Mozart should never have taken that court job or done those popular operas?

Being fair to the GP post, I think you are perhaps reading a little more into it than is there... It's fair enough to say that artists don't have a right to make money from their art. They don't have this right now, and never have had it. The fact is, if the art is good, people will pay for it. If not, they won't. Copyright is neither here nor there. Indeed I'm not sure that any of the examples you cite enjoyed any significant copyright protection on their work.

The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that.
Go and have a look at some of the musicians, opera singers, composers and the like (who didn't drink it all away) from previous centuries and realise what a piece of muppetry you are saying.

What seems to be missing from your post and the previous you replied to, is that all the previous "grand masters" worked to commission. ie. they were paid to produce a work for the commissioner. That is not true of the current situation, where artists are paid to produce work for organisations whose sole purpose in commissioning the work is in order to re-sell it at a profit. Therefore they over-produce and complain when the consumers don't consume.

Not quite so. This "muppetry" is quite true. Sadly or not, that is a debate.

- Mozart died relatively poor, in the middle of his Requiem.- Van Gogh shot 'mself in the chest, poor as a church rat.- Rembrandt didn't get paid for painting the Nightwatch because it was "too realistic".

The world is riddled with Artists who are poor during some stage of their lives. Some may gain recognition in life, some may gain it posthumously, some may never gain recognition. It is not your "right" to get paid for being an art

Maybe I didn't phrase that correctly. Artists have the right to make money from their work, they just are not entitled to enforce a way of making money this way. They don't have the right to prevent an evolution that will bring change to the way people enjoy music. And it just happens that today, they can't force people to buy disc in order to enjoy their music

I still believe that being an artist is not a job. The job you are looking for is entertainer. Creating art is a different piece of work that won't

I think that the vast majority of people don't care what you personally believe should be the yardstick of what is or is not "right".

No jobs are set in stone, neither because you or anyone else says so. Only what we collectively (the market) vote so with our money. That rockstars are a passing fad is a nice proposition. You can say the same about blacksmiths, buggy whip manufacturers, and hopefully pretty soon, sys admins.

Bottom line: we does what we does to get by. If other people are prepared to throw mon

No jobs are set in stone, neither because you or anyone else says so. Only what we collectively (the market) vote so with our money. That rockstars are a passing fad is a nice proposition. You can say the same about blacksmiths, buggy whip manufacturers, and hopefully pretty soon, sys admins.

In the XIXth century, in my country, button makers were organized as a powerful guild that controlled prices. A clever tailor invented a system that, only with pieces of cloth, allows to close a shirt without buttons. Button makers tried to lobby in order to forbid this. I see this as an anti-progressive stance (you are free to not call that 'evil' as I do)

Agreed, sysadmin is a job that could disappear in the next few years (not sure it will happen, but well). I think it would be immoral for them to write

"Maybe I didn't phrase that correctly. Artists have the right to make money from their work, they just are not entitled to enforce a way of making money this way. They don't have the right to prevent an evolution that will bring change to the way people enjoy music. And it just happens that today, they can't force people to buy disc in order to enjoy their music."

I will agree that they don't have a right to force you to pay for their music, but you don't have a RIGHT to their music if you don't pay them (or

If you want to take a stand and not pay for music that is your prerogative and I can support that. What is harder to support is the ideal that you shouldn't have to support the creator of a work and still have full access to said work. If you don't want to pay for a Renoir, you are welcome to paint your own copy for your own enjoyment. If you don't want to pay for someone else's music, you are welcome to record it yourself and listen to your own recording.

I can agree with that. I would only add that I consider the Internet a public place and that once something is published there, it should be considered available for copy and modification. I am doing computer science. It is called "informatique" in French : science information. Copying, modifying, transmitting information is what it is made for. These operations are almost free. Information creation is the choking point, the valuable step. The current (or can we say "former" already ?) distribution system t

Any entrepeneur who would be on the streets through lost revenue in his/her sale and fears it should simply not be trying to earn a living through his or her own business

No matter what you do, people might all of the sudden stop wanting to do business with your kind. Being given an hourly wage by your boss might shield you from the reality, but reality it is none the less.

Problem is, Ogg Vorbis is not a format you can play on the familiar brands of portable music players out there (Apple, Creative, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony). You could modify a player to do it, but that's something the vast majority of users are not wanting to do.

I do think we will start seeing a movement towards more AAC-encoded files, given 1) Apple owns the majority share of portable music player usage and sales and 2) most of the newer non-Apple players are now starting to support non-DRM'd AAC-encoded

I play Ogg Vorbis on my Samsung all the time thanks to RockBox [rockbox.org].

While that sounds like a good idea I'm not sure if most end users want to upgrade their firmware to do this--it's potentially dangerous and could result in a non-functional player if you don't upgrade properly.:-(

Remember, we want to keep things as simple as possible, and doing third-party upgrades can sometimes cause more problems than necessary.

You are most definitely re-encoding the file if you convert it from FLAC to MP3 or any other format. It was encoded once to FLAC, and it is being encoded again to MP3. The difference is you aren't transcoding from one lossless format to another, so you don't lose any more quality than you would if you ripped it from a the CD.

Monkey's Audio better than FLAC since when? Windows only, no portable support, more difficult to transcode, higher CPU usage at decode. Well, the latter is probably a non-issue, since there is no portable support whatsoever, but still.

Actually Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor played with the idea quite a lot.
He released Saul Williams' album, which he produced, under a "pay what you think is fair" scheme.
His conceptual album 'Ghost' was released 100% digitally & DRM free with the first (out of 4) CD freely distributed.
His last album "The Slip" is freely available for full download [nin.com] as a gift to the fan.
Most of his track material is released under the Creative Common scheme for the fans to remix, and he built a comunity site to support these. For all I know, he created the sourceforge of Music.
Nine Inch Nails is definetely a major band/artist too, and the first one of such importance to explore new way of distributing music.

His conceptual album 'Ghost' was released 100% digitally & DRM free with the first (out of 4) CD freely distributed.And the whole album was released under a creative commons license. So those of us who want the whole album for free can download it legally in flac form from TPB.

Seconded. There's a few artists on there that are were good enough to make me stop what I was doing and listen... soemthing quite rare these days. I remember Ruth Theodore being one of the more unusual ones.

His side projects Dragonfly Records and Liquid Sound Design lean towards the more psychedelic aspects of trance and dub. The liquid dub styles promoted through Liquid Sound Design in particular are releases that are well worth a listen and feature some re

I vaguely remember that he was one to the people consistently pushing for extensions to copyright length here in the UK.

Note how here in the UK copyright is now Life + 70 years...

In my opinion, his choice for DRM free formats is a natural followup to the same considerations that lead Recording Companies to go ahead and support the new Amazon music store which sells DRM free music in MP3 format: they were scared shitless that Apple was becoming the Microsoft of the Digital Music Distribution world and thus

"I vaguely remember that he was one to the people consistently pushing for extensions to copyright length here in the UK."
Copyright extensions for recordings, not all copyrights.
"Note how here in the UK copyright is now Life + 70 years..."
Recordings have a 50 year copyright. The life+70 bit comes from the Berne Convention, to which the UK is a signatory, but the Berne Convention doesn't cover recorded works, so their copyright period is set by individual countries.

"payed for the rest of his life for his 6 months of light work in 1966"

Sorry to reply if you are trolling, but I think you'll find from any reliable biography that he and the rest of the group actually did a lot more than what you so dismissively describe as "light work" before, in, and after, 1966.

Paul McCartney has an estimated worth of $1.6 Billion so it's not as if he's going to be affected by people pirating it so is far better placed than up and coming groups to be able to afford to take the hit.

$1.6 Billion in the bank allows you to be able to afford to have altruistic ideas.

However, the vast majority of musicians aren't in such a position so need the sales.

The only reason I didn't download other drm free ones in the past was the lack of flac or ogg. Flac is best of course, as it's just like buying the album for real.
Using one price for the globe is also cool. I never expected it to come from Paul McCartney though considering comments from him in the past.
I've never downloaded an album illegally in my life, but then I've never bought an album via a download either till now when finally someone makes flac available.
To be honest though, I'm mainly doing it out of principle to support good sense finally. I'd like to see Madonna's albums like this, I wouldn't have to all the way to the shops:-)

Flac *is* lossless. I have no intention of loading that into any players, merely it's a good lossless source that allows me to record to whatever format I wish to play in, namely ogg. Suggesting a proprietory format as an alternative really is not the way forward:-) I thought everyone here wanted out of proprietory formats.

I'm sorry my mod points just ran out. With Flac it's almost trivial to transcode to any format you want, and you don't have to worry about losses. I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC, and made a "second" library using AAC for my ipod. I wish I could keep the two libraries sync'd, but for some reason media monkey won't do it (transcode failures, not the inability to sync to a folder). Still, it works well, and if I decide to switch formats in the future, I just transcode again.

Seriously. It's about fucking time more artists started putting out flac downloads. I'm getting a little sick and tired of only being able to download mid to low level bitrate mp3s at full cd prices.

Oh and fuck apple losses and mp4. If you've ever had the "joy" of trying to get them to play, transcode, or burn to a cd on a non-macOS you know why flac is such a godsend. Good compression, full lossless, open format, and supported by most programs.

I kind of don't like the idea of doing a transcode to another compression format because of the potential of substantial sound quality loss if the transcoding isn't done properly.:-(

OMG... there should be a "Lossless compression for dummies" and you should deffinitely read it.

FLAC compression is similar to ZIP, RAR, GZ, etc compression in that the files you get contain the same information (e.g. music) as the ISO (if ripped from a CD) or the source from where it was compressed.

converting FLAC format files to another format could result in substantial sound quality loss.No more that converting from the original uncompressed music to the format you want.

Which is kind of the point, the best format/bitrate combination for a portable player will vary with the player you own. So best to have a lossless copy as the source so you can get to the format/bitrate you want for your current portable player with a mimumum of loss.

The problem with FLAC conversion is that most computer users don't want to waste the time download the appropriate program and then configure the program to do a proper conversion. They like to do things as simple as possible, not go through the whole rigmarole of the conversion process.

So he has a butt load of money. The fact is that he took the step and a lot of artists have been inspired by his music so perhaps they will be inspired by this move and follow his example. Does it really matter if he needs the money or not?
Oh and it doesn't matter if you like his current work or The Beatles his name is very well known in the music industry. If more big name artists take steps like this then things just might start to change.

When you have been famous for years, to the extend just your name is known to almost everybody, abandoning the classical publishers not only ie easy: it gives you MORE advertisement (e. g. a paper hree on/.)

OTOH, when you are a completely unknown new band, then you must be courageous. I for one will be happy when there'll be a post here listing the last ten courageous little groups trying http://magnatune.com/ [magnatune.com] .

And in case you were among the happy few knowing Magnatune, let's mention a foreign, minuscule one for classics mainly: Zig-Zag [zigzag-territoires.com]

A) Even post divorce he has a personal fortune of some GBP800m so he can afford to put out DRM free music
B) Pretty much anything he's done since about 1972 has been crap (sorry, but really guys...)
C) Except the Frog one

Big freaking deal. We are back to 1982 - digital music without copy prevention - plus the internet. This is where we would have been over a decade ago if the MPAA hadn't taken the DRM detour.

I guess the guy deserves some credit for not participating in the DRM clusterfuck, but he's still a decade behind where the industry would be if all the cocaine snorting suits running the business weren't a bunch of colossal idiots more intent on putting the internet genie back in the bottle instead of getting their p

But selling music downloads 'DRM free' is not new. I haven't bought any physical CD's for a year or so. Nowdays I buy music from Amazon, they have a section for MP3 downloads (tracks and albums). Generally the albums are priced less than the CD counterparts, and you don't have to pay for shipping. (You also save a trip to the vets office)

These mp3's are DRM free, I can just copy them to SD cards and put that in my mp3 playwr.

There is a lot of talk here on slashdot about other digital formats (FLAC , OGG) bu

Just purchased the MP3 version. It is, as claimed, mpga 320K, DRM-free. In addition to the tracks, you get cover artwork and liner notes as jpgs.

The range of purchase options is very interesting. $8.99 for MP3 files and artwork, $12.99 for a CD, $29.99 for a direct metal mastered double vinyl record, and $79.99 for a DVD containing 24bit 96Khz tracks, and a second DVD containing multi-track session files for a selection of the album tracks.

The purchasing experience was flawless: create an account, give a credit card (with optional choice of saving the number or not; I chose not), get a zipfile of the downloads. Not a wasted keystroke or mouse click.

This really is the way I want to purchase my music. Two big thumbs up from the consumer angle. Lots of choices, low prices, immediate downloads, supports the artists.

The site seems to be using some sort of Flash animation to process the payments and it's not on an SSL / HTTPS URL. At least, not in the usual sense. It says data is sent using SSL in the Flash animation itself, but there's no padlock in the browser, etc.. so no guarantee it really is using SSL.

(For what it's worth, I ran netstat to check it is using SSL, and it appears to be. But does Joe Public know that when they're told to look out for the padlock icon?)

In addition to the tracks, you get cover artwork and liner notes as jpgs.

Only jpgs? Not good enough! I want full-resolution TIFFs (or better yet, PNGs) of all the artwork. I can't stand the smoothing and edge noise that appears when images get converted to jpg. It makes my eyes bleed.

Am I missing something? I've bought dozens of DRM free albums over the years. Nothing on Amazon MP3 or 7Digital.com has DRM as far as I'm aware, so how is this news? At first I thought the album was also FREE (price wise), but it's not - you have to pay for it, so I don't get why this is a story??

We're the good guys, right? DRM is evil (true that), and we offer alternatives. But the fact is that before DRM came along, piracy of music on the internet was rampant. People (good and bad) didn't give it much thought since it was just so easy to copy. We now say "give it to us without DRM, and we'd gladly pay a reasonable price." But for most people, this is a lie. If it weren't for DRM, they would have no concept of the value of the thing they're copying. They would not have "paid a reasonable price" because they would just have downloaded it for free. Only when they were threatened by having that taken away did they think about opening their wallets.

The RIAA and DRM have been an important corrective event in our society. Because of them, we have become more aware that the producers of this content have a right to protect their investment. Whether you're an artist publishing a song or a coder licensing under GPL, respecting copyright is important for our economy, our access to artistic works, and our freedom.

We still have an uphill battle against the RIAA and their efforts to lock down every little bit of content and take away our right to listen to the content we paid for on any device we wish, let friends listen, etc. When the dust settles, a happy compromise will be reached where sharing with a friend (who will probably turn around and buy the whole album as a result) is reasonable fair use, while the same is not true for posting the copyrighted work on a P2P sharing network, completely taking away the livelihood of the artist who created the work.

My favorite band is They Might Be Giants. Not all of their stuff is fantastic, though, so I have sought ways to listen before buying. But in the end, I have legally bought and paid for every one of their albums. Maybe that's mostly because I'm a fanatic, but I also see it as a statement of respect to people whom I want to produce more of the same kind of brilliant stuff.

My major gripe with FLAC is that iPods don't support this format (without major firmware modifications to the player). Given the huge marketshare of the portable music player market that Apple enjoys, I'm surprised there hasn't been a movement to start selling digital music files encoded in the Apple Lossless format or more higher bit rate AAC-encoded format files for legal download outside of Apple's iTunes Plus store.

Well, in defense, FLAC is a free codec which has free (beer+speech) plugins written for most media player/conversion software. While I agree that there's a downside to having to convert your incoming files (and the requisite problems in translating tags one for one), ALAC is IP encumbered and it generally not available as a free plugin for most media players/converters.

Besides, I'm not aware of any iPod which can do a lossless file justice, from an audiophile perspective. You may as well run any lossless th

Monkey's Audio is already undergoing bit rot, and the legality of improving on existing decoders is dubious. Being in development does matter if you want to continue to enjoy the format on the devices of the future.